Archives
2003: Vol.
2, Numbers 1-12Read
past articles including:Series
on Leadership continued
Avoiding Dictatorship in a Free SocietyArt
and Politics Living
the Good LifeTeaching
Teens World
Peace in Less Than a Month?

“People
who respect themselves and others would never be criminals. When people do a crime
they must be given the opportunity for rehabilitation
and they must be helped. Instead our criminal justice
system brutalizes people and strips them of the
very human dignity that would produce positive
change in their lives and make them contributors
to society.”

The main question in dealing
with crime — in
prevention and rehabilitation — is “how
do we cultivate the consciousness of belonging?” A
person that feels like they “belong” is
on the path to self-improvement, commitment to the
common good, and self-esteem. It is the task of society
to make all citizens feel like they belong, like
they have a stake in the welfare of society. The
main purpose of any human being is “custodianship.” This
is an awareness of taking care of people, the community
and the environment.

The definition of “criminal behavior” as “the
violation of the ethic of custodianship” would
be more useful than all the laws on the books. For
example, corporations that destroy the environment
in pursuit of profits would be deemed “criminal.” If
they had a sense of belonging they would act responsibly
for the betterment of the environment. The ethic
of custodianship would transform political priorities
to protect and serve the common good, and to make
a quality of life a possibility for everyone.

As stated in the article Criminal
Justice - Part 1, criminal behavior and
aggression “are
symptoms of social failure.” How
can we call our culture “civilized” when
it produces criminals in positions of corporate and
political leadership as well as in the streets? The
common denominator of all the stripes of criminal
behavior is the lack of the consciousness of belonging
and custodianship, which causes actions based on
selfishness and alienation. This results in either
the desire to exploit or the desire to hurt.*

In one sense, the degradation
of our environment and the threat of global warming
are the result of a lack of the consciousness of
custodianship, hence “criminal.” All
people, all industries, all governments ought to
be custodians. The earth seems so vast that our sense
of “belonging” has given us the attitude
that we may use its resources and dump our waste
without considering if it hurts our earth. Our sense
of “belonging” is only recently making
us aware of our responsibilities. If we act to our
planet as custodians we will not harm it and we will
rehabilitate it.

In respect to people in prisons,
are they just the waste of our society, or do we
have a responsibility to rehabilitate them too? If
we are to be good custodians then the road to rehabilitation
is to make custodians out of prisoners also — to
make them feel they belong.

In the previous
article on criminal justice, I emphasized that negligence is a form of
cruelty. “Cruelty
may take many forms. Less obvious than outright brutality
and abuse, are the more subtly insidious forms of
neglect, exclusion, injustice, or simply not meeting
people’s needs.” Prisons are humiliating
and degrading and perpetuate the causes that produce
criminal behavior in the first place. Prisoners are
outsiders — they don’t belong.

One of the most effective programs for rehabilitating
prisoners has been prison gardens. An example is
a project at Rikers Island Prison, run by James Jiler
for the Horticultural Society of New York:

“This place is about transformation,” said Jiler, who specializes
in urban ecology and urban-design projects. “The
students [inmates] learn that if you can transform
this environment, you can transform your life, yourself.
We try to use the program at the gardens to help people
build self-esteem.”

Of the many articles on the positive impact of gardens
on people, it is most relevant to view the impact
on prisoners, since they are the ones who society
has given up on and whose crimes were largely the
result of coming from an environment that lacked
nurturing. Gardens in prisons are reported to teach
important life lessons, to teach skills, to teach
responsibility, to improve relationships, to put
inmates in touch with nature and to produce a new
sense of hope.

“Today, at the state corrections facility
in Elmore County Alabama, inmates are cultivating
a new garden behind prison walls. They plan to send
the flowers they grow to local nursing homes and
services for the elderly. "I've never really
started something and carried it all the way through," said
William Kizziah, one of several inmates who works
in the garden.”

Justice in our world today would
be to give all humans a chance to be custodians of
our planet. That is impossible in conditions of war
and civil conflict. To be a custodian one has to
first be a custodian for oneself and one’s
family. People must take a stand against the injustices
that are preventing people from having normal lives.
Then those who are fortunate to live in a prosperous
society must also provide resources for those in
need.

Injustice, exploitation, damaging
our natural environment, and harming other people
are the most grievous of crimes today. Since our
planet is at risk, since whole populations and nations
are at risk, our leaders must act from the ethic
of “custodianship,” otherwise
they are basically criminal. We need to rehabilitate
our planet and society and make our leaders human.
Perhaps a pre-requisite for a position of leadership
would be to plant a garden.

*This generalization
is about social causes and excludes psychological
or subconscious causes, which is another topic.